The new Eldorado of marketing is in the answers of algorithms

Not only on land, at sea or in the skies. Today, the new conflicts also pass through the giants of artificial intelligence. At stake is the positioning towards ever larger audiences conditioned by continuous conversations. It is there that a new power game is being played: in the ability to train models, control data, influence decisions. The war goes beyond technological assets towards the cultural hegemony of algorithms.

A few days ago, the huge audience at the SuperBowl was entertained by Anthropic's campaign with the payoff 'advertising is coming in artificial intelligence, but not in Claude'. The spot shows conversations with chatbots interrupted by paradoxical advertisements to denounce the risk of a future dominated by algorithmic advertising. The dig is for the eternal rival OpenAI, which did not wait to respond. Amusing but dishonest, replied Sam Altman stingily about the adverts. Regardless of these exchanges, AI is transforming search because search no longer just returns links. This rewrites advertising and investment strategies of brands, which have to preside over a broader ecosystem.

Thus, marketing shifts from search engine positioning to the building of trust in the algorithm economy. In short, from traditional search to the recommendation paradigm. After all, AI rethinks marketing in the age of algorithmic decision-making: for Gartner, traffic to traditional search engines will fall by 25 per cent this year in favour of AI assistants and chatbots. For Salesforce already 17% of online orders are generated or serviced by agents, contributing to $13.5 billion in sales. In fact, 1 in 5 online purchases are made with chatbot conversational agents. During the last Black Friday, agents influenced $14.2 billion of global sales by influencing 38% of consumers. Business Insider wrote this with an evocative headline: "Artificial intelligence is quietly becoming shoppers' secret weapon".

From search to (synthetic) answer, one might say. Because the front door of the web no longer opens the same way as before. "For years, digital marketing worked on keywords. With AI, the logic changes: users formulate problems. They no longer write "running shoes pronation", but ask: "I am 45 years old, I run three times a week and I have knee pain: which shoes should I use?". The competition is no longer on the position in the results, but on the probability of being mentioned in the algorithms' answers. But our research shows that when decisions are supported by intelligent systems, people delegate part of the evaluation toalgorithms, especially in complex contexts. But trust remains fragile: users accept the suggestion if they perceive consistency,' says Lucio Lamberti, professor of marketing at the Polimi School of Management and scientific director of the Behavioral Research in Immersive Environment Lab at the Politecnico di Milano.

But if conversational platforms become intermediaries of users' decisions, languages evolve as well. "The advertising does not disappear but changes form. In conversational interfaces it is less the ad next to the result and more the presence within the response that counts. Brands will enter recommendations if algorithms consider them credible sources. This favours informative and verifiable content rather than promotional messages. All this will lead to a redistribution of budgets: to be mentioned in responses, companies must produce useful and accessible information,' Lamberti points out.